Buy your friends a “Christmas-card” carton of Chesterfield this year!

I’ve made it no secret over the years on this blog that I’m a huge fan of old time radio. One of my favorite joys during the holiday season is listening to Buck Benny’s OTR podcast and hearing the Bing Crosby radio shows that took place through the months of November and December from various by-gone years in the late ’40s & early ’50s. Not only do you get to hear great Christmas music sung by Bing and guests but you also get fun commercials pushing cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes as Christmas presents to give to your friends & family.

Chesterfield is a cigarette brand that was popular in the first half of the 20th century. They are still manufactured to this day (Phillip Morris bought the brand in 1999) but are hard to come by in the United States and most of their sales now come from Europe. Anyway, they sponsored a number of radio shows and would go all out around the holidays by sprucing up their cigarette cartons with a holiday theme and or the faces of the celebrities they were sponsoring at the time. They would even include a nice little gift tag on the box so the person you were giving it to knew who bought it for them.

Can you imagine a cigarette company doing this now? There would be outrage!  No way would the tobacco industry have the balls to encourage giving cartons of cigarettes to your friends & family for Christmas. You’d only see something like this these days in a Saturday Night Live skit. Ah, smoking. It was so innocent back in those days (just like suicide)!

Hey, future Mr. President! What are you giving your friends for Christmas this year???

What's funny is despite being sponsored by Chesterfield for a number of years, Bing thought they tasted awful and would often hide Lucky Strikes in a Chesterfield package.

Artwork look familiar?

What's going on here?

Jane Pauley?

Page & Shaw Christmas ad featuring Bob Hope (1956)

I’m not familiar with the Page & Shaw candy company. The only information I can find seems to point to Page & Shaw Inc. being one of the nation’s top candy makers in the early 1900s. Judging by the product pictured, it appears they were similar to a Whitman’s/Russell Stover. It doesn’t appear they are in business any longer but I did find an interesting article from the New York Times (PDF format) from July 20, 1918 about the Federal Food Board shutting them down for a week because they had stockpiled more sugar than the Food Administration permitted.

The ad above is from 1956 and I have to say, this is a pretty creepy painting of Bob Hope. He looks evil. Apparently he was somewhat of a spokesman for Page & Shaw though because I found another ad he did (same pose, but this is a photograph) in 1955.

Santa can’t meet dress shirt quota, attempts suicide

Here’s a some dark holiday humor for you from 1947. According to the ad, the demand for Arrow Shirts is so great that jolly Old Saint Nick can’t meet those demands. He’s become so depressed that he’s decided it’s better to off himself than to face disappointing the men of the world. What a strange, sad holiday advertisement. I’m assuming these two guys in the background made it in time before Santa pulled the trigger on his musket. I can’t imagine a musket being a clean way to go out.

Dark humor like this was mainstream in the ’30s and ’40s. I’ve listened to plenty of radio shows over the years where one character has told another character to “go blow your brains out” and it wasn’t said in a mean or vindictive tone at all. It was viewed as a perfectly harmless joke that got the crowd laughing. A number of times a gunshot was used on these shows to infer a suicide has taken place… all for the sake of a gag.

During the course of Jack Benny’s radio & TV shows, there was an annual Christmas shopping episode where Mel Blanc (as a department store worker) would be driven crazy by Jack’s indecisiveness and the final result on a number of occasions was Mel Blanc committing suicide with the aid of a gun. Even Dennis Day’s character on the show would sometimes randomly state that he was going to commit suicide.

It’s actually a bit shocking when you hear suicide discussed so flippantly on these shows because most of those shows were so tame when it come to other matters such as sex, alcohol and politics. It’s funny how views have changed because you’d never hear such light-hearted graphic talk about suicide on today’s shows.

Anyway, this Christmas ad is an interesting look back at a time that’s probably not as innocent as we like to think it is.

Kellogg’s Corn Pops: 1951 – 2012..?

An interesting article was posted this past summer at 24/7 Wall St. about brands that are projected to disappear in 2012. Sears, Sony Pictures, Nokia and MySpace are on the list but on a more serious note Kellogg’s Corn Pops made the list as well.

Debuting in 1951 as “Sugar Pops”, the cereal was re-titled ”Sugar Corn Pops” in the late 1970s before finally settling on “Corn Pops” in the 1980s. I remember a few years back they changed the name yet again, this time simply to “Pops” (which I always found strange). Luckily, the cereal was restored to “Corn Pops” after only a few months.

Surprisingly, in the United States alone the cereal had a number of mascots over the years: Woody Woodpecker, Newt the Gnu, Sugar Pops Pete (a prairie dog cowboy), Whippersnapper (a cowboy), Big Yella (another cowboy) Poppy (a female porcupine) and most recently Sweet Toothasaur. Poppy was a mascot during the ’80s yet I have no recollection of her or anything of these other mascots. I can only remember tag-lines such as “Gotta have my Pops!” and “It’s hard to stop when it’s my Pops!” and the use of the JAWS theme in the commercials.

So what’s the reason Corn Pops is in mortal danger? Well, sales are down because people are looking towards healthier cereals and when you’re using BHT (something found in embalming fluid) as an ingredient you can’t really claim to be all that good for anyone to eat. Never mind the fact that everyone knows Corn Pops are covered in sticky, sweet sugary glaze. Falling sales are only half of it though. The price of corn is on the rise and that makes it harder for this brand to turn a profit.

Truthfully, there was nothing in the article that said Corn Pops was definitely going extinct. All the article was saying was that the brand was having a hard time and they were suggesting it’d be a wrap in 2012. Although I don’t eat Corn Pops as much as I did when I was a kid, I still get cravings for it and pick up a box every few months. It’d be a shame to think I could no longer do so come 2012.

So here’s to ya, Corn Pops. I tip my cereal bowl to you and I hope you can somehow find a way to soldier on in a world of raising costs and where people are choosier about what they consume.

Justin Bieber’s Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

So I’m a fan of The Original Christmas Classics and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town on Facebook and saw a link in my news feed this morning about an Amazon Instant Video Offer. I already own all of the Rankin Bass specials on DVD (the ones that are available, that is) but I figured what the heck and clicked the link when what to my eyes did a appear — a Justin Bieber music video (too bad it wasn’t “Justin Got Run Over By a Reindeer”)!

Despite this guy apparently being some huge music sensation, I couldn’t tell you a single song he’s sung even if you held a gun to my head. I’ve never heard a Bieber song other than a few songs from his recent Under the Mistletoe Christmas album. And that brings us to this special Amazon offer called Justin Bieber’s Santa Claus Is Coming Town. In reality, it’s a music video for the song “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town”. You click the link, Tweet about the Amazon offer, then you’ll get a $2 credit to your Amazon account and can then use that credit to download the $1.99 video (Where’s my penny?!).

Now, I bet you’re asking why anyone would want to download a Justin Bieber music video. Because of its connection to the classic Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town holiday special, that’s why! Bieber is transported to the world of animagic, getting the puppet treatment himself, and is inserted into scenes from the special along with new scenes featuring Kris Kringle himself and Topper the Penguin.

To be honest, I initially was like “child, please”, closed the tab and was about to carry on with my regularly scheduled web surfing. Then I pondered it and figured I had nothing to lose other than four minutes of my time since the video was free after all. Plus, I wanted to see the new footage or Kris & Topper.

The song sucks. It’s an updated pop/rock version that’s just bad and exposes how mediocre of a talent this kid is. It’s not enough he has the kind of face you want to punch — he’s not a good singer at all. I really hate updated version of Christmas songs. If you’re not going to play them straight, then just make up an entirely new Christmas song.

But oh well, just wanted to throw this out there if you’re a RB nut like me and you’re willing sit through the music. Click here and download the video for FREE.